Natural gas is stored in storage facilities to meet peak and seasonal demands. These storage facilities typically are salt caverns and or old gas production wells. The geological formation of a salt cavern must have a minimum salt core thickness of 60 meters, thus these requirements in geological formation limits the location for natural gas storage facilities.
Processes for liquefying natural gas have been proposed, such as U.S. Pat. No. 6,751,985 (Kimble et al 2004) entitled “Process for producing a pressurized liquefied gas product by cooling and expansion of a gas stream in the supercritical state”.